With that, he pushed the biggest button, flairing his arm out to the side dramatically and holding the device up as if it were about to perform some miraculous task.
It beeped.
"Ooh, Concert F." muttered the Phantom to himself.
It beeped again.
"Really? I thought it was E sharp." replied the Doctor with a quizzical brow.
This time it beeped at the end of his sentence. It was evident that it had assumed a set tempo at a beat per second. At every beep a strange antenna on the end of it flashed yellow at its tip.
"Does it really matter?" snapped Christine. The Phantom rolled his eyes at her naivety, disgusted at the infancy of her musicianship despite his teachings.
"Does it matter whether B is C flat or A double sharp or neither?" he retorted through two and a half beeps. Christine shook her head in exasperation-being that kind of a martinet in terms of music, he could only be the very same voice that had been teaching her for two fortnights. Upon realizing that she felt something odd and cold in her diaphragm, and so decided to put it away for now. The strange device provided apt distraction.
"What did you do?" she inquired, unaware that the Angel had been about to ask that himself.
"Basically nothing, just turned it on," he explained, to the disappointment of the Phantom who had expected a rather lengthy and intricate explanation of the oddity's inner workings. "But when we do this…."
Overdramatizing again, he swayed his free arm out as he turned slowly to the left. The beeps picked up their tempo. Having completed a ninety degree rotation, they had doubled their time.
"That happens," he murmured, voice dropped and smile faded. Sensing the urgency somehow associated with the device's behavior, neither of his companions spoke. Behind her back the Angel drew closer to Christine again. Upon the Doctor repeating the maneuvre, the accelerando occurred again, seeming to match Christine's frantic heartbeat in their panic. She had no idea why she was so scared when she had nothing to be afraid for save her Angel's dire prediction and the Doctor's peculiar behaviour. This kind of fear was unlike any she'd ever experienced, even the kind she had felt when she'd gotten lost in the Opera house for the first time. Something in her core told her that this time there was truly a reason to be fearful, a reason so huge and transcending that she was terrified out of her wits even though she scarcely understood it.
How come she had never felt that before, then?
The beeps became a monotone.
All three of them froze, a still life shot of an uncanny blend betwixt something familiar to human nature and something strange to the human's heart. None could look anyone else in the face, and none could imagine anyone's expression. Every pair of eyes was trained down that hall of darkness where the note echoed into itself.
"We've found it, Doctor, would you mind stopping that noise now?" murmured the Phantom, too entranced by the danger to be as acidic as he intended. The Doctor's reply was even fainter.
"I have."
So horrified she couldn't even gasp, Christine looked to the device and witnessed the antenna's lifeless dull.
"The lantern, Christine?" asked the Doctor in a half-whisper.
In a stupor she obeyed, scarcely comprehending that she was doing anything other than staring down the black corridor. The lantern was taken from her by the hand of the Doctor, stretched backwards behind him and feeling for its handle as his eyes continued their original course. He slowly, carefully brought the light to bear on the shadow immediately before him, casting it back like a wild beast before open flame. Though the light had gone from them, Christine and her Angel dared not move. Not any closer to the occultly cloned sound that reverberated towards them, towards that fiendish thing that made the impossible immaculate in its reality.
Of course, the Doctor had to do the opposite. He stepped forward.
When nothing happened, Christine's heartbeat managed to slow down a tick, calming at least enough for her to be conscious of the events around her. She heard the Phantom exhale softly behind her, his breath warm on her shoulder to her surprise. Emboldened by a lack of negative consequence, or any consequence at all really, the Doctor took another step. More darkness cleared revealed nothing. Realizing the light was a little far for her liking, Christine followed the Doctor until she was in the sphere of illumination, shadowed by her Phantom. Accustomed to the repetition, they expected the next step to be just as mundane at the first. Why, Christine even began to think that maybe there was nothing to be frightened of at all and that they were all totally safe.
I suppose they'd never heard of the old adage about lucky third attempts.
The next footstep taken into the darkness brought to their vision a creature of untold monstrosity. The first thing revealed was a mouth held agape by three jaws, wide enough to engulf a human head with ease and joined between the jaws by a skinlike membrane. Out of this tongueless aperture echoed an exact replica of the sound created by the Doctor's alien detector, shocking even the Phantom with its perfection of pitch. The head from which this mouth protruded was encapsulated around the head proper and the topmost jaw with a smooth white carapace, giving the impression of a skull save for the lack of orifices. The sleek black neck came into view as it took a further step into the light with an equally ebony foot that formlessly pooled on the ground like ink. Another foot soon followed, bringing the front half of its body into the light. Completely obscuring its chest were two giant interlocked growths of bone, appearing as clawed paws guarding some awful morbid secret within its heart. Down its back as it was revealed went what appeared to be a spine, tiny ribs protruding from each vertebrae for a few inches down each side before terminating too soon. The tail that undulated from its rear was thick and almost grossly muscular, sometimes tall and thin in dorsal and ventral areas in an almost finlike structure. If you were either desensitized enough to completely ignore its every oddity or legally blind, it could look like a dog the size of a lion. It was unlike anything Christine had ever hoped to see and far exceeded her most eldritch imaginative powers. Her jaw dropped farther than it would for her darkest sound.
The Phantom, though admittedly stupefied himself, had to suppress a snicker at her reaction.
"There you are, beastie," whispered the Doctor. Although he was only talking to himself everyone heard him on account of their not making a sound. At his vocalization, the creature paused and refixed its muzzle directly up at him, closing its horrendous maw to the relief of Christine especially.
"It heard you," observed the Angel, narrowing his eyes as he took in the creature's anatomy and tried to put the pieces together in his head. Christine was a little farther behind.
"Didn't it see you?" she asked, wondering why that was news.
"Can't very well see me without eyes, can it?" pointed out the Doctor, voice rising in volume a little to match hers. He wasn't moving in the slightest, merely observing the creature even as it observed him, albeit with an entirely different sense that the alien couldn't even comprehend.
"Well, then how did it hear you?" she inquired again, backing up a step when the creature lifted a forepaw and hindpaw as if about to walk. "It doesn't have ears, either."
"Sure it does, five of them in fact!" he contradicted, even smiling a little as he did so. "There's the one it's pointing at me right now and then the ones it walks on. Perfectly good ears, in fact some of the best in the universe."
Christine was so baffled that she couldn't even think of anything intelligent to say.
"In fact it's listening right now," mused the Doctor to himself, tone dulling from the brightness it had undertaken when expounding the alien's mysteries to Christine. "This alien, the soundhound of Locre VII, is a listening machine. It doesn't even comprehend light and dark, they're useless to it in the underground caves of its homeworld, all it knows about the world around it comes from sound. The dead-silent walk, the powers of echolocation, the carapace that acts like a dolphin's melon, every adaptation is fine tuned to one sense and one method of survival. Sound. ...which, conveniently enough, it also uses to hunt."
Finally, the Doctor began backing away. The soundhound followed him, making an odd purring noise that was pleasing despite the knowledge that it meant doom.
"First to lure…"
The unnatural mouth opened again, wider than ever.
"...and then to kill."
Though the moment happened all in a heartbeat, it seemed to tick away in minutes to the Phantom. The alien suddenly inflated so rapidly and grotesquely that it seemed as if it were exploding from the inside, jet black skin stretched to a disturbing limit in its entire torso, tail and neck. Christine startled backwards into him, his arm automatically going over her shoulders as his body involuntarily put itself between her and the soundhound. Then the Phantom noticed the Doctor's face of horror and shock and a thousand other terrible things that struck fear into the very core of man.
He had seen that face before and knew exactly what it meant.
A sensation of falling gripped all of them in the chest, dragging them down into a black abyss. The light that had been with them above was swallowed up by the shadow, replaced by a cold that stole breath even as one tried to find it. All three of them hit the ground at the same moment that a deafening noise halfway between an enraged predator's scream and a thunderclap occurred somewhere above them that was far too close.
For a moment, Christine thought that she had died.
Wordlessly a hand from above took hers and heaved her to her feet, dissolving her theory as it brought her to the approximate level of glowing yellow eyes. If she had died, surely the Phantom would not be in heaven with her. To her surprise she didn't even flinch at the sight of them, but she did feel a pang of yearning for the small illumination they gave when he turned away from her.
That was completely backwards and she knew it. So why didn't it feel that way?
"Don't bother keeping quiet," instructed the Doctor from the darkness, scarcely being heard on account of the ringing in their ears. "It certainly heard the fall, and all the rest of your movements, for that matter. Sound travels much faster through solids than air."
"Then what do we do?" demanded Christine, once more afraid for her life now that she knew it was still occurring.
"We're safe for now," murmured the Phantom, evidently still not convinced of the lack of need to be silent. "the only way it could follow us is-"
Far off in the night an inhuman skull without eyes on the wall was lit in red by an opera house furnace.
"-unless it can climb."
The Doctor was going to add something witty to his next bit of dialogue to keep it from being cliche, but then the soundhound started sprinting.
"Run!"